The Fanfiction Professor
by Kaitaloipa
Summary: Set in the future, when all of Western civilization has been lost to us ... except fanfiction. It is up to the scholars to piece together the "past" from the fragments they can find... Who was this Harry Potter, really? Did he even exist?


I'm a classics major ... it is a tickling notion to propose the Harry Potter universe as the elusive "Trojan War" of the future, and its fanfiction as the surviving texts. I don't own Harry Potter. Enjoy! Please review!

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><p>It was Nither's turn to teach intro. He always wondered, on the first day, if his displeasure at teaching the class was as evident to his students as their displeasure at taking it was to him. But there were distribution requirements, after all, and Intro to Mythology was a famously easy A.<p>

In previous years, when saddled with this class, Nither had attempted to get their interest on the first day. Hook them. This was, after all, a course that could lead to future mythologists. He would talk to them about rape and incest and murder. He would make them think – pretend to think – that he was talking about a modern story. Then he would reveal it was really just one of the myths.

Today, though, he didn't have the heart. Intro had been taught in the same lecture hall for years, and that only served to highlight how enrollment had dropped in the last decade. The interplanetary wars were of course a factor. Engineers, geneticists, doctors, yes – but war was no time to listen to stories.

"Professor Nither?" a girl's voice said. One of the students who sat in the front row in his lectures was waiting behind him in line for coffee. She had wings. Nither assumed she was something of a rebel because her wings were black and sparkly. Nither himself, who had never opted for any kind of gene manipulation, was usually was something of a purist, really only comfortable with natural-looking enhancements - but this girl did pull off the sparkly wings pretty well. She had jet black hair, very pale skin, and the posture of someone who is not accustomed to being intimidated.

"I read your work on twincest," she said. "It was fascinating."

Once, before Nither became quite as renowned and jaded as he was at the moment, he would have been flattered. But now he felt merely apprehensive. Students didn't usually try to ingratiate themselves with him unless they wanted something from him, he'd found.

"I'm glad," he said in his most reserved of professorial voices.

"My name is Sue," the girl said.

"Well that's very traditional," said Nither, approving in spite of himself. Nothing quite like a good mythological name. "How are you liking the class so far?"

Sue thought about this very seriously, her wings stretching slightly and then retracting behind her. "I guess I'm just confused about particulars," she said. "But in general it's a fascinating class."

"What are you confused about?" Nither asked resignedly.

"I just wish I knew more about what they actually thought _back then,_" Sue said. "Did they really believe in all this stuff?"

"All this stuff-?"

"Like – magic. And with the other cycles – the Force, aliens—did they really think there were _aliens?_"

Nither had been waiting for her to go away so he could sit down and drink his coffee in peace at one of the empty cafeteria tables, and this question alarmed him in its open-endedness. He said curtly, "It's very difficult to guage what the ancients _believed_. After all, what we can piece together about them is only fragmentary. Have a good day."

"You too, Professor," said Sue.

Nither removed himself to the nearest empty table and then watched as Sue got her coffee and sat down alone at another empty table. She pulled out her tablet and began scrolling with her thumbs. He realized, from the rate of her scrolling, that she was probably _reading_. He felt suddenly wrongfooted and annoyed, but he wasn't sure with whom.

One of the color-enhanced students from Intro to Mythology, this one blue, was evidently dating Sue because the next time she accosted Nither, she had the blue boy with her. He seemed as unwelcome of small talk with their professor as Nither was, but Sue was impervious. She said, "I have a question about what you said. Rowling didn't exist? How can you prove that?"

"You can't prove it," said Nither. "It's just unlikely. We think it was just a literary form of politeness – to claim you got your story somewhere else."

"But why do you think that..."

"Because we've nver found anything attributed to Rowling herself," Nither said.

"Right, but... where did the people from the stories come from then?"

The blue boy said, "Sue, I promised Rand we'd help him set up."

"Oh, right," Sue said. She told Nither, "Would you like to see our show tonight? It's an a cappella group. Proceeds go to help the Martian refugees."

"Thank you," said Nither, "for the invitation, but I really can't."

At home, he was struggling to finish his fourth book. He sometimes missed his ex-wife, but it was enough to immerse himself in his research, most of the time. The Trek cycle wasn't really his forte, but since he was one of three tenured mythology professors at the University of the Sea of Tranquility, he was allowed a certain freedom.

He had just opened a second commentary when the doorbell rang. He was surprised – he lived in a relatively undisturbed part of campus, separated by two tunnels and an airlock from the part the tourists usually went to. He went to the door and discovered Sue and the blue boy. The blue boy appeared to be somewhat charred. Sue's wings were beating faintly and rapidly behind her. She glanced behind them, at the grayness of the street and the oxygen awning above them, before saying, "Professor, I'm really sorry, we've got nowhere else to go."

The charred blue boy coughed and leaned against Sue. Sue shouldered him and pulled him towards Nither, across the threshold, and into Nither's house. Nither was obliged to back up. She yanked the door shut behind her and said, "Thanks, Professor."

The smell of smoke engulfed Nither's hallway.

"We were protesting the second Martian massacre," Sue said, "out in the main quad, and ... well ... Jack sort of got carried away and set fire to the politics building."

Jack grunted. "Serves them right," he said, "racist bastards."

Nither heard sirens.

"Is Jack Martian?" Nither asked Sue.

"No, I'm not," said Jack. "But it's not a crime to want justice in the world, is it?"

"Of course not," said Sue firmly. She said to Nither, "Is it all right if we stay with you for a while, do you think? Until at least we can change Jack's skin color? Otherwise they might realize it was him. He kind of... does this. But he hasn't been caught yet, and we want to keep it that way."

Nither was trying to think of a way of saying "No," other than just that word, but before he could, Sue said, "Thank you so much. Where is your shower? Nevermind, we'll find it."

She shouldered the blue boy and led him away down Nither's hallway.

Nither's refugee students kept to the living room and guest room for the next week. Neither of them seemed particularly troubled by the amount of classes they were missing. Nither heard peripherally, in faculty rooms and on student publications, that the arsonist was missing, but no one knew who it was. Nither was torn between taking perverse, admittedly puerile pleasure in thwarting the university, and wanting his house to himself again. But even that was not entirely a curse. He realized that for the first time in many years, he was actually _talking _about the stories again. It had been so long – his own college years were only a distant memory – but the urgent, indignant fervor with which Sue approached every question about the myths was infectious. He grew to like how she distracted him from his research after work. During the day, holed up in his house, she read his compendiums on mythology while the blue boy watched entertainment.

The blue boy, who planned on being a geneticist, looked bored bordering on irritated whenever Sue engaged Nither in a conversation. This, too, pleased Nither. He felt confirmed in his own superiority; his useless knowledge, his long and profitless efforts at research were suddenly dusted with the allure of sexual triumph, even though the only thing sexual about his relationship with Sue was Nither's ability to annoy her boyfriend.

"What do we know about them?" he asked the table at large, one night after dinner when the wine had been opened, and he was feeling particularly expansive and intellectually triumphant. "They were inclined to homosexuality and pederasty. They were in some ways godlike, possessed with powers utterly unlike our own. And their men could become pregnant. Who were these people? Was there really a Harry, a Draco, an Aragorn? Surely there must have been. But could they really do all those things?"

"Men becoming pregnant isn't very hard," Jack said.

"They didn't have our technology," Sue said. "They only had things like the Internet and pills."

Jack tried to look unimpressed by such an idea. Nither noticed that he was starting to turn slightly turquoise. It struck him that as soon as Jack had become sufficiently green they would leave him. He felt a pang of something that wasn't relief, and that surprised him.

Three days later, Jack was looking decidedly green, and also decidedly tired of being stuck in Nither's house all day. Sue and he agreed that they would go back to their dorms the next morning. But before that, she said, they had to celebrate. More wine was opened, and Sue and Jack cooked for Nither. After dinner, Sue and Nither argued over their favorite mythical writers. Sue liked Mintyfreshsocks, but Nither preferred Flamingo. They learned that they both had an abiding love of Executrix.

Jack retired to the guest bedroom before Nither and Sue had finished talking, looking sour and annoyed. After he was gone, they sat together in the kitchen, in the late evening, Nither pondering Sue's sparkly black wings and imagining how much more exciting his life could have been if he were more like Severus Snape or Lucius Malfoy. It was a mild, almost amused thought, and it was less a bitter aftertaste than a sweet residue of a life spent too timidly.

He asked her what she was going to study, and she suddenly looked wary. Her wariness confirmed the mistakes of his life – she was not going to study his field. He should not, in all likelihood, have studied it either.

"Genetics," she said.

Of course, Nither thought. Of course she will.

"Or at least, that's what my parents want," she said. "But... well, I really _want_ to study the myths. My parents would be really upset, that's why I won't. But I don't care that it's not useful. It's amazing. Looking at the connections and thinking about what they thought. It's the most exciting thing in the world to me."

And suddenly, Nither couldn't speak.

Luckily, the doorbell rang, and so he was spared needing to. He got up to get the door – checking as usual through the peephole that it was not University law enforcement – and saw to his surprise that it was his old friend the archeologist Chirpick. He hadn't seen Chirpick for several years, because Chirpick was an Earth archeologist and funding was hard to get for archeological trips any shorter than three or four years. Universities wanted you to get your money's worth of findings for the trip.

"Chirpick! I didn't know you were back!"

"I only just got here," said Chirpick, hustling inside and closing the door. "Nither, there's something very important I want to show you. Before we talk to the university about it. I think – you deserve to see it first."

Chirpick was a tall, thin man with wiry, thinning hair, and increasingly greyed skin. Nither had always felt admiration – and a certain amount of jealousy – for the scholars brave enough to risk radiation for the sake of artefacts, but watching his friend deteriorate more and more with each Earth excavation project had only ever dampened his own interest in doing primary research. He brought Chirpick into his kitchen, where Sue was still seated, and pulled out a chair for Chirpick without remembering to introduce them. Chirpick looked at Sue askance and Sue said, "I'm Nither's house guest."

"This is Chirpick, he's an Earth archeologist who just got back from an excavation," said Nither.

Chirpick nodded, cleared his throat, and said, "Well, Nither. Everything's about to change. You have to understand. _Everything_."

Nither's heart began to pound. Even though he didn't yet know what was coming, he understood what it meant. Here it was – at last – that moment that the famous thinkers have – the moment in which they ride the crest of a wave of change in their field – and he was _present. _He was about to witness something momentous.

"Did you find something by Rowling?" Sue asked.

"No," said Chirpick. "No. Something much better."

He reached carefully into his coat and produced something that took Nither a moment to recognize. It was a long, ribbon-shaped piece of dark plastic with little holes along the edges. Then Chirpick held it up to the light and Nither realized it was film: the plastic was transparent and, through the light, one could make out a sequence of minutely differing images.

"This," said Chirpick, "may be the one thing that will keep the university from freezing funding for Earth excavations."

"What is it?" said Sue.

"It's a form of moving image-taking that the ancients used to preserve events," said Chirpick.

Nither realized in one thunderous moment what he was seeing, and felt his breath leave him for an instant as he exhaled. On the film was the recurring image of a black-haired bespectacled boy with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.

Nither said, "I don't believe it."

"Yes," said Chirpick, "it's-" He paused, not bothering to continue the sentence. Then he said, "and that's not all, Nither – look there, look at the ones with his wand, with a Patronus - with images of _magic, _Nither. Harry doing magic. We don't even know what to make of it-"

"Have you verified – it's from the right time, it's not a – fake?"

"It's from the right time."

Nither stood in the middle of his kitchen, letting it sink in – that the myths really _were _real, really _did _come from somewhere – that somewhere, long ago, there _really was a Harry Potter _and that here, on this film, was a picture of the real man. And not only that, but _magic _– once, long ago...

He suddenly let out a roar of triumph and seized Chirpick in an embrace. Chirpick laughed, startled, and then suddenly he let out a whoop as well. Nither's body felt limited – nothing ought to contain this kind of excitement-!

Sue, who had picked up the film and was inspecting it, said, "Why are Harry's eyes blue? That doesn't make sense."

"Discoloration," said Chirpick promptly.

"Drink," said Nither. "This calls for a drink. Here, there's some wine left-"

"My dear Nither, have you installed a fireplace?" Chirpick asked suddenly.

"No, why do you ask-?"

Sue screamed. Nither spun around and realized that the hallway was on fire. He could see its light from the door, which was ajar, and he could hear it and smell it.

"Why is my hallway on fire?" Nither demanded.

Sue wailed, "Jack!" and leapt into the air. For a moment her wings beat the air wildly, and then she was aloft, hovering a foot or two off the ground. She yanked at the door to the hallway, flew through it, and up the stairwell to the guest bedroom.

Chirpick said, "Do you have any windows that aren't in the ceiling?"

"No," said Nither. "We could try climbing up the cabinets to get to the skylight."

They started doing this, with some difficulty because it was starting to be difficult to breathe, when Sue flew back into the room. She was sooty and her wings had stopped sparkling, but otherwise she appeared unharmed. Jack was not with her. "He climbed out a skylight in the guest room," she said. "Here, I can fly one of you at a time out of this one. Who first?"

Nither felt that rules of hospitality obliged him to let Chirpick go first. And after all, Chirpick had the film. He watched Sue hoist Chirpick into the air from his armpits, feeling suddenly very worried about his own excessive paunch. She flew Chirpick up and out of the kitchen skylight, which she butted open with her head. They were gone for less than a minute, but by then the fire had started to spread into the doorway of the kitchen, and Nither was breathing through his sleeve. He got down low on the ground, and before he even realized it, Sue was hooking her arms under his armpits, heaving him off the ground, and slowly – painfully – lifting him upward.

Through the skylight, over the roof, and down onto the gravel of the moon's surface in front of his house where Chirpick was waiting. They stood together, coughing for a little, listening to the sound of sirens approaching. Other professors were emerging from neighboring houses, frazzled and in their night clothes. The stars overhead were twinkling through the oxygen awning, and Earth was especially bright tonight.

"Where is Jack," said Nither through gritted teeth.

"I think... I think he was upset tonight," said Sue apprehensively. "He's been upset lately. Sometimes that makes him..."

"Sometimes that makes him _burn things down?_"

"Well, it's a bit of an excessive response, yes," said Sue. "I guess he ran off now."

Behind them, the fire was leaking out of a good half of Nither's skylights.

"I'm very sorry about your house," Chirpick said. "But the film is safe, yes?"

"Of course the film is safe," Nither said furiously, rounding on Chirpick, "it's with you, isn't it?"

In the light of Nither's burning house, Chirpick paled.

"Ah," he said.

Nither felt like his insides had turned into a black hole. He turned back to the house, half-contemplating running in through the front door, but before he could Chirpick grabbed his arm.

"It's too late, Nither," Chirpick said hoarsely.

Sue looked between them, and then said, "Well, do you remember where you found that piece of film? Maybe there are more pieces where you found that one. Back on Earth."

There was a silence, except for the sirens and the muttering professors in their nightgowns. Chirpick finally said, "That was the only one we found. At any rate, it was the last Earth trip the university was funding. It's relocating funds to the genetics department."

"Oh," said Sue.

She hesitated, looked between them, and then said, "I had probably better leave before the firemen get here. I should find Jack."

Nither nodded numbly. His field had been deprived its greatest advancement in hundreds of years; his career had been deprived of some last hope of greatness; and now, Jack was getting the girl, even though Jack was some pyromaniacal college idiot. He felt incensed by the injustice of the world.

Then he felt Sue's fingers on his elbow, her lips on his cheek, and she whispered, "I'm going to switch majors."

As she leapt off the ground and flew away across campus, her wings making a black silhouette against the starry earthlit sky, he realized that one day, after all the little things stopped mattering, he would remember this night as a triumph: he would remember the smell of his house burning and the way it felt to have Sue fly him up out of his own skylight, and he would remember the sight of Harry Potter's face on that film. And even if it would not be proved in his lifetime, he knew that one day, the world would know that once, long ago, Harry Potter really lived.


End file.
